If he wanted that then he should have stayed with the Boys Brigade.
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There’s been an expansion of specifically flagged religious groups over the last few decades.
No merit badge is neccisarily required from what I remember. A certain number and type of merit badge is required for each achievement/award/level in scouting.
I dropped scouting before to long at the full boy scout level. So most of my experience was cub scout level. I don’t recall getting more than one or two actual boy scout merit badges. After our first camping trip I was done with it.
What I recall from back in the 80’s and 90s is that there were the specific religious awards similar to what you remember. But that there were also merit badges or their cub scout equivalents (was it pins?) that were explicitly tied to religion. In specifics I recall a religious tolerance or religious studies badge that required visiting 3 types of church. And a similar one that required attending a religious service not your own.
Both assumed you had a religion of your own and involved interaction with your presumed clergy. And if memory serves the list of religions provided or suggested was exceedingly limited. Which lead to some problems with which church we’d attended “counted”. We were also required in some fashion to get those badges. Even when we’d prefer not to.
Additionally nearly every community or public service award included as an explicit suggestion, in the manual and in leader materials, of a religious activity as a qualifying project/action. So your actively religious kids could basically have their priest sign a bunch of papers and get a big fist full of pins badges and what have. Say they’d been an alter boy. That’d get you a bunch of stuff right off the bat.
And like I said I was explicitly told more than once that being an atheist would prevent me from certain achievements. Including Eagle Scout. I remember some trouble with my arrow of light. One of the guys who said this to me was the 2nd in the hierarchy for our whole county.
The extent to which you experienced any of this is gonna be down to how things were administered in your local troop, who sponsored them. I think we were sponsored by the local Catholic arch diocese at that point. And how much your individual leaders were willing to fudge shit or push back. A lot of people in scouting push back on or ignore this kind of thing. But the national level org has often had a surprisingly reactionary bent when they get involved. And looking back there was a tremendous soft pressure on the subject.
And when your young you don’t neccisarily notice. In large part because the cub scouts end of it is so separated from the larger organization. I learned about a lot of stuff later, after I’d left scouting. And my mom was our den leader. But once I got older and there was more interaction with the broader troop I started to get pretty uncomfortable. There were numerous instances where I had to fight for something I’d earned because it didn’t include a religious element. Checked off by my scout leaders but rejected by the troop. And a lot of times where I had to participate in religious functions I’d rather not have.
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My troop was hosted by a Unitarian Church. That was cool.
Being an openly atheist scout was not fun.
I agree, but only because of a couple of the ‘leaders’. Most of my scoutmasters were retired military. I had a marine, a submariner, a ranger, and a smattering of former infantry to show us the ropes. Shockingly enough, drill was something my troop was good at, which was not fun.
Still glad I did it, and I suspect I had a slightly easier time than you did - so imagine what might happen when there aren’t cranky old mormons effectively on the board of directors anymore??
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Are uninvited barristers OK?
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I see wut you did there! 
Yeah I’ve come to realize how much BS I avoided since my mom was our den leader. We caught wind of a bit of it. But I learned about her ongoing fight with scouting a lot later.
Wasn’t allowed to continue with us past Cub scouts (she was allowed to bring snacks and sew stuff though!) And once my youngest brother stopped attending they forced her out. A lot of kids left scouts when she did.
Number 2 I mentioned above was a former marine. Apparently I was un-American.
Oh I had a ball as a kid. When I got older it got weird. And like I said a lot of this stuff I learned well after I stopped having any connection. It’s only as an adult that I looked back on it and connected it all. I remember most of it pretty fondly.
It’s just those last 3 or so years. None of it really sits well with me these days. As much as I got out of it as a kid. I don’t know if I’d subject a kid to that.
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Does it say exactly what those beliefs should be? 
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I think that the Boy Brigade might have been along the lines of mainly Protestants; those slums contain a lot of Jews and Catholics who can die for the Queen like any Protestant boy. 
Been there, done that, I think coed is actually easier. They spend more time trying to annoy each other than getting into anything actually dangerous.
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The last I checked, no, so any number of religions are accommodated. A long time ago it was just people who were keen on jesus.
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The methodist church I was at (until I reached the age of reason and largely lost the faith) had a scouting troop for a while, until it sputtered out due to a lack of kids and someone willing to run it. The equipment that the church had stockpiled sat for quite a few years until another organization came in and picked it up. (IIRC, they had their own troop and just took over the church’s.)
As a former cub (and boy) scout, I think this is a good direction for the organization to be moving.
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No need to let loose the dogs, then.
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Just like the Mormon’s “cut ties” with the moon Mormons in 1969 when we landed there? Fuckin’ Mormons and their magic underpants.
I had NO idea this was a whole meme and I’m excited now!
Also, my nephew is a Scout and my sister’s family is evangelical. I wonder if they’ll quit now. My nieces are already in some Christian alternative of the Girl Scouts, because I guess the Girl Scouts are too feminist? My own kid was never a joiner of any kind… she wouldn’t want to be part of any organization that would have her. She might join the Future Corpses of America, but that’s about it…
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Weirdly enough, they are. I’ve known several Mormons and former mormons, and they are all super nice. It’s kind of weird how nice they are.
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They are super nice, unless you want to marry your same sex partner, and then they do all they can to keep you from being able to do that. I’m fine with Mormons as people, I’m not fine with bigotry. They don’t have to personally support gay marriage, but they can’t deny others basic rights.
Not a single person here suggested that the LDS church and its members shouldn’t have the freedom to worship, but that doesn’t mean that they can impose their values on others, including through the Scouts.
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Well, that’s no loss. Probably better of without them!
Always found this to be an odd line in the movie. Not only doesn’t it fit the movie, which isn’t exactly a nostalgia-fest, but… really? I had great friends when I was twelve, but those friendships don’t hold a candle to the ones I’ve cultivated as an adult.
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Okay. I’ve been doing that as a volunteer for the past 12 years.
Absolutely no problem.
I was also at the World Scout Jamboree in Japan in 2015. 14,144 male scouts and 8,752 female scouts (ages 14-18) were also present. Many (mostly muslim) countries sent gender-sorted troops, but the majority was coeducational. Only a few countries (countries like Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, and the USA) sent male-only contingents. Either way, no one was more than 20 seconds of walking distance away from a tent containing young people of the opposite gender.
So much for “it’s not really done”.
It’s not only “done”, America is the exception to the rule.
We’ve been doing it in Europe since the 70s; WOSM (the World Organisation of the Scout Movement) has been recommending it since 1991.
Nope. It has everything to do with “moral suasion” or “culture”.
Unless… maybe it’s all because the for-profit American health insurance industry fails to cover the cost of cooties vaccinations for all kids?
I can’t confirm that. While I’ve never been part of single-gender scouting organisations, I’ve interacted with single-gender groups, and I’ve found them to be no different from random single-gender subsets of coeducational groups. Care to elaborate on the “fundamental difference” you’re seeing?
I find my own view of Mormon influence in the BSA to be very much dictated by the fact that I am a Scout myself, but not an American. The BSA is not just some youth organisation that I can just tolerantly ignore when it displeases me, it is a different local chapter of the same worldwide “movement” that I am part of. These are my brothers (and sisters, yay!) in Scouting, whether I want it or not.
The LDS have been redefining what scouting means in the US, and they’ve been pushing it in a direction that I absolutely cannot identify with. But if a troop of a fictitious “Mormon Boys Organization” ended up camping next to my scout troop, we’d initiate friendly contact and organize some common activities. I’d still think of them as crazy fundamentalists, but I’d do so in a well-meaning way (the friendly rivalry between Scouting and Austria’s dominant catholic youth organization is the stuff of legends).
So, it’s got nothing to do with religious freedom, and it doesn’t have anything to do with my personal opinion of the few Mormons I’ve personally met in my life, when I say that I’m happy about the Church pulling out.
I’m a very reverent atheist. And I don’t see why a Satanist couldn’t be reverent. Depending on what form of Satanism they practice, they might have a harder time with some other Scout Laws, but I don’t know.
Also note that the concrete list of Scout Laws is specific to a national scouting organization (in this case, the BSA) and as such, is not set in stone.
Also relevant, something I wrote here a year ago when this happened: Boy Scouts of America to allow transgender boys to enroll - #81 by zathras
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